Homage To Hemingway

I. THE NOVELIST IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

They sat informally around a stripped-pine kitchen table. Behind him was a matching dresser, opposite him a picture window, through which he could see a cluster of damp sheep, then some rising pastureland that disappeared into low cloud. It had rained every one of the five days they’d been here. He wasn’t sure this kind of communal living, which had sounded so jolly and democratic in the brochure, was for him. Of course, it was the students who were expected to cook, wash up, and keep the place tidy, but, since half of them were older than he was, it would have been stuffy not to muck in. So he stacked plates, made toast, and had even promised to cook them a big lamb stew on the final night. After supper, they would put on their waterproofs and slog a mile down the track to a pub. Each evening, he seemed to need a little more drink than before to keep himself stable.

He liked his students, with their earnestness and optimism, and asked them to call him by his Christian name. All did so except for Bill, a rather truculent ex-serviceman, who preferred to address him as Chief. Some of them, it was true, enjoyed literature more than they understood it, and imagined that fiction was mere autobiography with a tweak.

“I’m just saying, I don’t understand why she did it.”

“Well, people often don’t understand why they do things.”

“But we, as readers, should know, even if the character herself doesn’t.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I agree. I mean, we don’t believe anymore in the—what did you call it, Chief?”

“Omniscient narrator, Bill.”

“That’s the ticket.”

“All I’m saying is, there’s a difference between not believing in an omniscient narrator and not understanding what’s going on in a character’s head.”

“I said, people often don’t understand why they do things.”

“But, look, Vicky, you’re writing about a woman with two small children and what sounds like a perfectly O.K. husband who suddenly ups and kills herself.”

“So?”

“So maybe—maybe—there’s a question of plausibility.”

He could feel tempers rising but was disinclined to interrupt. He preferred to muse on the question of plausibility. Take his own case. Or, rather, his and Angie’s. They’d been together seven years, she’d shared every day of his struggle to become a writer, he’d produced his first novel, she’d seen it published and well reviewed—it had even won a prize—whereupon she had dumped him. He understood women leaving men because they were failures, but leaving him because he was a success? Where was the motivation in that? Where was the plausibility? Conclusion, one among many: Don’t try putting your own life into fiction. It won’t work.

“Are you saying my story’s implausible?”

“Not exactly, I was just . . .”

“You don’t believe such women exist?”

“Well . . .”

“Because, let me tell you, they do. They do.” Vicky’s voice now had a tremble to it. “That woman, that woman you don’t think is plausible, that woman’s my mother, and I can tell you she was plausible enough to me in real life, when she was alive.”

There was a long silence. Everyone was looking at him, expecting him to take charge. Which he would, of course, though not by sitting in judgment, rather by telling them a story. It was a stratagem he’d devised on the first morning—of throwing into each session an anecdote, a memory, a long joke, even a dream. He never explained why he was doing it, but each free-form intervention was designed to make them ask: Is this a story? If not, how might we turn it into one? What do we need to discard, what keep, what develop?

And so he told them about going to Greece, perhaps a dozen years before, back in the late sixties. It was the first time he’d been in a country whose language he couldn’t understand at all. Friends had rented a house on Naxos for three weeks. It was high summer, and six hours on an open deck from Piraeus had left him with a sunburn that made him nauseous and kept him indoors for the first two days of the holiday. The few other foreigners on the island were as conspicuous as his little English group must have been. In particular, he remembered an American, a chunky fellow with white hair and a short-trimmed beard; he wore a loose white shirt over belted shorts and drove a white jeep or buggy, which seemed equally at home on the beach as on the coastal road. The man would roar past, one leg out on the running board and one arm around a woman—late thirties, perhaps—with olive skin and black hair dyed an unconvincing blond. She was evidently a local woman, and the prim young Englishman he’d been (but implicitly was no longer) had concluded that she was the island whore, rented by the week at perhaps the same rate as the jeep; or, indeed, with the jeep, in a package deal. Occasionally, he and his friends would see the couple in a bar or a restaurant, but mostly they were in motion, showing off. The fellow had clearly been modelling himself on Hemingway, and the prim Englishman, both impressed and disgusted by the macho swagger, had hated him on sight. Every time the jeep drove past him on the beach, even if it was far away, it seemed to be throwing sand in his face.

He left it at that, hoping that his students would reflect on the assumptions we automatically make about people—even up to the possibility that the couple were happily married tourists, and the husband had always dressed and worn his beard like that. He also hoped that they would reflect on life’s influence on art, and then art’s influence back on life. And, if they had asked, he would have replied that, for him, Hemingway, as a novelist, was like an athlete bulked up on steroids.

“O.K., all of you, now tell me what’s wrong with the following line: ‘Her voice was so lovely and it always reminded him of Pablo Casals playing the cello.’ ”

He didn’t tell them that it was from “Across the River and Into the Trees,” a novel that epitomized for him the worst of Hemingway. At university, he and his friends had taken to mocking the line, inserting the names of other cellists, other instruments, other physical attributes. “Her breasts were so lovely and they always reminded him of Stéphane Grappelli playing the jazz violin,” and so on. It had been a game that ran and ran.

“I think that’s rather nice. I wish someone would say that about me.”

“It’s showing off, like he’s hitting us round the head with high culture.”

“Did I say that it was written by a man?”

“It’s obvious. Any woman can tell.”

He nodded as if to allow a palpable hit.

“Why does the writer say ‘Pablo’? Why not just ‘Casals’?”

“Perhaps to distinguish him from Rosie Casals?”

“Who’s Rosie Casals?”

“A tennis player.”

“Sorry, did she play the cello as well?”

And so they got through the morning. They were a nice bunch, all eight of them: five women and three men. A poet friend of his had suggested that creative-writing courses were basically sex academies, where the tutor automatically enjoyed jus primae noctis. But perhaps aspirant poets were different from their prose equivalents. There was one woman in the group to whom he might happily have offered private lessons, but he gave up on the idea after spotting her arm in arm with Talentless Tim, who defended his consistent use of cliché by saying, “It’s not cliché, it’s vernacular.”

They were settling in at the pub, pulling chairs together, when Bill slapped his palm on the table.

“Hey, Chief, I’ve just had a thought. What if it was Hemingway, the man himself, on that island of yours?”

“Not unless suicides come back from the dead.”

Oh, shit, he thought, looking around to see if Vicky had heard. Luckily, she was up at the bar buying for them all. Trying to seem casual, he asked if any of them had read Hemingway. There were only two yeses, both from men. But everyone knew something about the writer’s life—bullfighting, big-game hunting, expatriate in Paris, war correspondent, many wives, drinking, suicide—and so everyone, from this knowledge, had an opinion about the work. The consensus was that Hemingway was a writer whose era had passed, and whose opinions were now out of date. Vicky began a long rant about cruelty to animals, and, yes, perfectly on cue, Bill asked her if her shoes were made of leather.

“Yes, but it didn’t come out of the bullring.”

And so he listened and smiled and drank some more. At the pub, he stopped being a tutor; they could say what they liked.

On the last evening, he cooked a gigantic stew and provided so many bottles of wine that they didn’t need the pub. Responding to their praise, he told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients, whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. And short-story writers? someone asked. Steak and chips. Dramatists? Ah, dramatists—they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, and would be satisfied to shake a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub.

This went down well, and they started fantasizing about the sort of food famous writers would serve. Jane Austen and Bath buns. The Brontës and Yorkshire pudding. There was even an argument when Virginia Woolf and cucumber sandwiches were put together. But without any discord they placed Hemingway in front of an enormous barbecue piled high with marlin steaks and cuts of buffalo, a beer in one hand and an outsized spatula in the other, while the party swirled around him.

The next morning, they shared a minibus to the local station. The rain still hadn’t given up. At Swansea, there were handshakes and some shy cheek-kissing, and the woman he’d fancied gave him a look that seemed to be saying, No, didn’t you see, it wasn’t Tim I would have gone for—I only put my arm through his because I felt sorry for him. All you had to do was look at me properly, make some kind of sign. He wondered if this was a correct conclusion, based on his sympathetic imagination, or merely mad vanity. But, in any case, she was now on a different train, heading toward a different life, while he sat at the window on his own, looking out at wet Wales. He found himself thinking that, driver aside, a white beach buggy had an unquestionable glamour about it. If you drove one around London, people would probably think you a member of a rock band rather than a mere prose writer. The pity was, he couldn’t afford one. All he could afford was a secondhand Morris Minor.

II. THE PROFESSOR IN THE ALPS

He sat at the head of a long, dark table with six students at precise intervals down each side. Fifteen feet away, at the other end, was Guenther, his teaching assistant, whose broad shoulders and cheerful sweater obscured a view of forest, looping cables, and high mountains. It was mid-July: the ski shops and hire places were closed, as were half the restaurants. There were a few tourists, some groups of hikers, and this summer school, which had invited him to teach—in English, fortunately—for six days. He was offered business-class travel, a decent fee, a healthy per diem, and use of the school’s minivan whenever it was free. His only other obligation was to give a public reading on the final night. He was looking forward to this: his generation of writers had adapted well to the expectation that they become performers as well as private, solitary truth seekers and truth-tellers. He was at ease with interviews, usefully provocative on political issues—especially when he had a new book out—and a little whorish at the microphone. Ah, the lure of the prepared impromptu. This side of him had come as a surprise, pleasant to him, less so to Lynn, his wife, who had just left him. It had not been an agreeable time lately. “And don’t write a book about us like you did with Angie” had been one of her many parting lines. He had raised his hands, palms forward, as if to say that not only would he never do that but it had been a clear mistake in the first case. Even if the novel had made a couple of short lists. Even if fiction was, as he liked to say, omnivorous and essentially amoral.

“But what does the Herr Professor think about this?”

“I’d like to hear what the rest of you have to say first. Mario? Dieter? Jean-Pierre?”

He needed more time to think. It was an afternoon session, which was intended to range more broadly. In the morning, they discussed texts that the students were to be examined on; in the afternoon he was expected to stretch their brains, make wider cultural connections, discuss social and political topics. It ought to have been a breeze, but there were times when their Continental minds, their natural ease with the abstract and the theoretical, made his English pragmatism seem like mental sloppiness. Still, they liked him, and he liked them, not least because they seemed to ascribe his lack of rigor to the vibrancy of his imagination. He, they never forgot, was the Herr Professor, the one who had written the books. And, if all else failed, he could always tell them an anecdote, a dream, a memory, a shaggy-dog story. They were very polite, and had heard about the famous English sense of humor, so anything he said that was at all odd or incoherent was greeted with respectful laughter.

But Jean-Pierre and Mario and Dieter had all delivered their opinions, and now it was up to him.

“Do any of you know the music of Sibelius?”

Only two: good.

“Well, you must forgive me if I can’t explain it in the correct musicological language. I’m only an amateur. Anyway, O.K., Sibelius: 1865, approximately, to 1957, approximately.” He knew these were exact dates—this was what he meant by “whorish.” “Seven symphonies, one violin concerto, orchestral tone poems, songs, a string quartet called ‘Voces Intimae’—‘Intimate Voices.’ Let’s take the symphonies.” Not least because he had nothing to say about the other works. “They start—the first two—with great melodic expansiveness. You hear a lot of Tchaikovsky, a bit of Bruckner, Dvorák, perhaps, anyway, the great nineteenth-century European symphonic tradition. Then the Third—shorter, just as melodic, and yet more restrained, held back, moving in a new direction. Then the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic, the work where he most engages with modernism.” He’d stolen that phrase from an Austrian pianist who said in a radio interview, “No, Sibelius is not of much interest to me, except for the Fourth, where he engages with modernism.” “Then the Fifth, Sixth, and that epitome of compression the Seventh. To my doubtless fallible ears, one of the things Sibelius is asking, from the Third to the Seventh, is: What is melody? How far can we compress it, reduce it to a phrase, even, but make that phrase as charged and memorable as some Big Tune from the good old days? Music that seems to question itself and its underlying justification even as it beguiles you. I wish I could play you some.”

“Herr Professor, there is a piano in the conference hall.”

“Thank you, Guenther.”

He frowned as if his train of thought had been interrupted. His teaching assistant was always looking for ways to assist, which was logical, and yet, at times, disconcerting. Still, Guenther was very good at shameless queue-barging to fetch the Herr Professor his coffee.

“So what I suppose I am trying to say is: What is narrative? What is this thing—this ancient, wonderful thing—we call a story? This is a question modernism asked, and, you could say, we all still need to ask. So when I consider that simple, essential question—What is narrative?—I often find myself turning to the mighty Finn. Sibelius,” he added, in case they didn’t know the composer was Finnish. “Yes, Sibelius. Well, a break, perhaps, and, yes, thank you, Guenther, and no milk.”

When they resumed, twenty minutes later, the teaching assistant arrived with a record player and several old LPs.

“I have the First Symphony, the Fourth, and the Seventh, Herr Professor.”

“Guenther, you’re a magician. How did you do it?”

His assistant smiled shyly.

“I found the name of a music professor in the village. He was delighted to lend you the records. He sends you his honored greetings. The player belongs to the school.”

He was aware of the students looking at him expectantly.

“Well, then. The first movement of the Fourth, if you don’t mind.”

And so he sat and thought how wonderful it was to be paid to listen to Sibelius, even if it was for only ten minutes and fifty-three seconds. How wonderful the music was, how darkly orphic in this landscape of tall trees, clean air, and blue sky. His life was a mess, his last novel had been crapped on from a great height by all the shitbags in London, he doubted he would ever write anything of lasting value, and yet—with those strings climbing timorously and the brass clearing its throat as if to make some great statement that was never, finally, made—there were still transcendent moments to be had in this poor existence of ours.

When the movement ended, he nodded at Guenther to lift the pickup. And just sat there, not saying a word, but trying to imply: I rest my case. Later, at supper, where everyone sat hugger-mugger, some of the students told him how much they had liked the music. In another mood, he might have taken this amiss, and presumed they were saying they didn’t like something else—his way of teaching, his clothes, his opinions, his books, his life—but the music had delivered, if not a peacefulness, at least a quiet pause into his being. And, more and more, he thought, that was the best you could hope for in life: a kind of pause.

The next afternoon, he decided to tell them about Hemingway. He began with the man in the white jeep on Naxos, which over the years had become for him an emblematic warning of what happens when a writer’s life takes over from a writer’s art. Why would anybody want to go around pretending to be Hemingway? he asked. He didn’t imagine there had ever been fake Shakespeares in England, ersatz Goethes in Germany, faux Voltaires walking around France. They laughed at this, and, had he known the Italian for “fake,” he would have thrown in Dante to please Mario.

Then he told them how for a long time he had disregarded Hemingway but in recent years come to admire him greatly. The stories, rather than the novels: in his view, the Hemingway method worked better over the short distance. Well, it was the same with James Joyce. “Dubliners” was a masterpiece, but “Ulysses,” for all its opening brilliance, was essentially a short story on steroids, grotesquely bulked up. He liked this opinion of his, and the way it always caused disquiet—here even more than usual, he noted.

But he wanted to direct his students to a story called, appropriately, “Homage to Switzerland.” Not among Hemingway’s more famous stories, but one of his most formally inventive. It had a three-part structure. In each part, a man—an expatriate American—was waiting for a train at a different Swiss railway station. All three were waiting for the same train, and the men, though they had different names, were versions of one another, or, quite possibly—not literally, but metaphorically, fictionally—the same man. He is waiting in the station café, because the train is late. He drinks, he propositions the waitress, he teases the locals. Something, we are meant to conclude, has happened in the American’s life. Perhaps he is burned out. Perhaps his marriage is in ruins. The train’s destination is Paris: maybe he has been running away from something and is now returning to it. Or maybe his ultimate destination is America. So it was a story about flight and the return home—also, perhaps, a flight from the self and a possible, hoped-for return to it. And the way the three parts of the story overlap, just as the men overlap and the cafés overlap and the train overlaps, makes us think about the way our own lives overlap with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit.

There was a silence when he finished speaking. It was odd, he thought, how much easier it was to talk about something when you hadn’t reread it for a while. You didn’t get so bogged down in particularities—the wider truths of fiction seemed to emerge naturally as you spoke.

“So, Herr Professor, you are telling us that Hemingway is just like Sibelius?”

He smiled enigmatically and made the coffee sign to Guenther.

III. THE MAESTRO IN THE MIDWEST

The only view was of classrooms and other offices, though if you pressed close to the window you could see discouraged grass below and sky above. From the start, he had declined to take his expected position at the head of the three metal tables that had been loosely bolted together. He would place the student whose work was being discussed at the head, and the principal critic, or responder, at the foot. He himself would sit a third of the way along one side. His positioning was designed to say, I am not the arbiter of truth, because there is no final truth in literary judgment. Of course, I am your professor, and have published several novels, whereas you have only had stuff in campus magazines; but this doesn’t necessarily make me your best critic. It may well be that the most useful assessor of your work will be found among your classmates.

This wasn’t false modesty. He liked his students, all of them, and believed the feeling reciprocated; he’d also been surprised how each, regardless of ability, wrote with an individual voice. But everyone’s critical sympathies ran only so far. Take Gunboy, as he thought of him, who turned in nothing but Gen-X stories set in a rough part of Chicago, and who, when he didn’t like someone else’s work, would shape his hand into a revolver and “shoot” the author, adding the gesture of the gun’s recoil for emphasis. No, he would never be Gunboy’s best reader.

It had been a good idea to come to this Midwestern campus, to remind himself of the normality and ordinariness of American life. From a distance, the temptation was always to see it as a country that every so often went mad on power, and gave itself over to the violent outbursts of a steroid abuser. Here, away from the places and the politicians that gave it that bad name, life was much like life everywhere else. People worried about the usual small things, which to them were big things. As in his fiction. And here he was treated like a welcome guest—not a pariah, not a failure, but someone with his own life who had perhaps seen a few things they hadn’t. Occasionally, there was a certain gulf in understanding: yesterday, he’d been sitting up at a lunch counter when his neighbor asked genially, “So what language do they speak in Europe, then?” But such details would be useful for his American novel.

If he ever wrote it. No, of course he would write it. The question was: Would anyone ever publish it? He had taken this job partly to escape the shame of having his last novel, “A Kind of Pause,” turned down by twelve publishers. And yet he knew it wasn’t a bad book. Everyone said it was as good as all his others—and therein lay the problem. His sales had been flatlining for years; he was white and middle-aged, with no other identity—smug TV panelist, for instance—to lift his profile. In his view, the novel—indeed, The Novel—delivered its rare truths through the artful mingling of intimate voices; yet nowadays people wanted something noisier. “Perhaps I should kill my wife and then write a book about it,” he would complain in self-pitying moments. But he didn’t have a wife, only an ex-wife, toward whom he bore sentimental rather than murderous feelings. No, his novels were good, just not good enough, that was the truth. One publisher had written to his agent that “A Kind of Pause” was “a classic, well-crafted mid-list book, the only trouble being that the mid-list doesn’t exist anymore.” His agent, with perhaps excessive candor, had passed the judgment on to him.

“Maestro?” It was Kate, his cleverest student, even if she did have too many dogs in her stories. Once, he had written in the margin in red Biro “Kill the dog.” The next story she had presented to the class was called “The Immortal Dachshund.” He’d liked that. Teasing, at times, could be almost as good as love, sometimes better.

“I think you’ve covered all my points,” he said. Though his main point, had he been harsh enough to make it, would have been: Why is this male take on existential angst so reminiscent of all the others you have submitted? But he didn’t say things like that; he felt his students’ vulnerability as if it were his own. Instead, since they were nearly halfway through the three-hour session, he simply called, “Cigarette break.”

Often, he would join the class’s three smokers in a huddle around a waste bin. Today, he strode off as if he had business elsewhere. Well, he did. He walked to the nearest edge of the campus, which was built on a rise, and looked out into the flat, inexpressive, agricultural distance. He didn’t even need to light a cigarette. The view and its vast ordinariness were as good as nicotine. When he was young, he’d got satisfaction from imagining himself different from others, potentially special; now he was comforted by reminders of his own—our own—insignificance. They calmed him.

Maestro. He grunted quietly to himself. When he first met his class, one of them had addressed him as Professor. He’d jibbed at this—after all, he wasn’t an academic, and preferred to think of himself as a writer among fellow-writers. On the other hand, he didn’t want them calling him by his Christian name. Some distance was necessary. And “Mr. ——” didn’t feel right, either.

“Why don’t we just call you ‘Maestro’?” Kate had suggested.

He’d laughed. “Only if you do so ironically.”

Now he grunted again. At times, the label hurt. How proud he’d been to see his name on title page and book jacket year after year, but what did that signify? Jane Austen’s name had been set in print only twice in her lifetime—and that in subscription lists for other people’s books. Oh, enough, enough.

Every so often, to change the class’s diet, he would hand out a short story he hoped would help them, or at least give them a sense of perspective. So, later that afternoon, he distributed Xeroxes of “Homage to Switzerland.”

“Oh, Maestro,” Kate said, “I can tell I’m going to be off sick next week.”

“You mean you have preconceptions?”

“Let’s call them postconceptions.”

He liked the way she held her own.

“For instance?”

She sighed.

“Oh, the ultimate dead white male. Papa Hemingway. The celebration of machismo. Boys with toys.” She deliberately looked at Gunboy, who, just as deliberately, took aim and shot her.

“Good. Now read the story.” And, in case she took offense, added, “Dog killer.”

The following week, he started by telling them about the Hemingway clone on the Greek island; then about the Swiss Alps and being asked whether he was comparing Hemingway to Sibelius. But this got little response, either because they hadn’t heard of Sibelius or—more likely—because he hadn’t explained it properly. O.K., over to them.

It depressed him how soon the class divided along sex lines. Steve, who was phobic about adverbs anyway, liked Hemingway’s stylistic economy; Mike, whose formal high jinks often concealed a paucity of subject matter, approved of the structure; Gunboy, perhaps deploring the lack of firearms, said that the story was O.K. but didn’t blow him away. Linda talked about the male gaze, and wondered why Hemingway hadn’t given the waitresses names; Julianne found it repetitive. Kate, on whom he had been counting, tried to find praise but even she ended, wearily, “I just don’t see what he’s got to say to us.”

“Then try listening more carefully.”

There was a shocked pause. He had turned on his favorite; worse, he had stepped out of character. There was a tall poet on campus with a reputation for humiliating his students, destroying their poems line by line. But everyone knew poets were crazy and unmannerly. Prose writers, especially foreign ones, were expected to be civil.

“I’m sorry. I apologize.” But there was a tightness about Kate’s face that made him feel guilty. It’s not your problem, it’s mine, he wanted to say. He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind—or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn’t sure what this might mean—except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

But he didn’t tell them this. Instead, he began again, as if for the first time. He talked about the myth of the writer, and how it was not just the reader who became trapped in the myth but sometimes the writer as well—in which case we should feel pity rather than blame. He talked about what hating a writer might mean. How far and for how long do we punish thought-crime? He quoted Auden on time pardoning Kipling for his views—“And will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardons him for writing well.” He confessed to his own early dislike for Hemingway, and how it had taken him a long time to read the words without seeing the man—indeed, this might be the most extreme example of the myth obscuring the prose. And how that prose was so different from the way it looked. It seemed to be simple, even simplistic, but at its best was as subtle and deep as anything by Henry James. He talked of Hemingway’s humor, which was much overlooked. And of how, alongside what might appear to be boastfulness, there could be surprising modesty and insecurity. Perhaps this was the key, the most important thing about the writer. People thought he was obsessed with male courage, with machismo and cojones. They didn’t see that often his real subject was failure and weakness. Not the hero of the corrida but the humble aspirant gored to death by a bull made out of kitchen knives strapped to a chair. The great writers, he told them, understand weakness. He left a pause, then turned back to “Homage to Switzerland.” Note how the three-in-one American expatriate, despite wit, sophistication, and money, is morally inferior to the simple Swiss waitresses and bar patrons, who are sturdily honest, who do not run from reality. Look at the moral balance sheet, he urged, look at the moral balance sheet.

“So why doesn’t he give the women names?” Linda asked.

Which was coming out on top, irritation or depression? Perhaps there were some writers who would always be read and misread for the wrong reasons, who were, in fact, unrescuable. Auden, revising his work in later life, had cut those famous lines about Kipling and Claudel. Perhaps he came to believe them untrue, and that in the end time didn’t pardon.

“They’re waitresses. The story is seen through the eyes of the American outsider.”

“Who just wants to pay them for sex—as if they were whores.”

“Don’t you see, the women have the high ground?”

“Then why not give one of them her own name?”

For a moment, he thought of telling them the story of his life: how Angie had left him because he was a success, and then Lynn had left him because he was a failure. But he didn’t tell them that. Instead, he turned to Kate, in a final attempt at something—he wasn’t even sure what—and asked, “What if I wrote about this and gave my name and didn’t give yours, would that really be bad?”

“Yes,” she replied, and it seemed to him that she now thought the less of him.

“And if I left out my own name and gave yours, would that make it better?”

“Yes,” she said.

And so he did. He tried to write it all down, simply and honestly, with clean moral lines.

But, still, nobody wanted to publish it. ♦

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